Chapter 2: Chapter 1: Hurry Up And Wait

Jack released a long, low groan at the pulsating throb of agony through his skull, clutching at his ears with both hands as his body jerked upward abruptly. A klaxon alarm blared around him, the steady repeated loop of it reverberating off sterile, vaguely blue-hued metal walls.

The echoing was maddening, like the inside of a cave, as if there wasn't a single soft surface to absorb a bit of the noise. A shudder ran through Jack that wasn't his own, but the building expressing its displeasure at something. It wasn't an earthquake, the small, rational voice tucked away in the back of his dazed mind began to rationalize.

It was going on in this continuous, steady rumble that never seemed to vary in intensity. 'What the fuck is going on? Where am I, even? I don't remember doing any heavy drinking or anything last night that would leave me like this...' he grumbled, internally, eyes rapidly fluttering as he tried to blink away the blurriness and rise to his feet.

Now that he could see a little better, the metal of the hall he had seemingly collapsed in wasn't bluish, it was the glow of what was presumably some form of emergency lighting running in a thin stripe along the crevice where wall met floor. It was enough to see around himself, and tell where the passageway turned off by the splotches of darkness that indicated an intersection, but not much more.

"HELLO!?" He called out with a hoarse rasp in his voice, feeling as if he hadn't had anything to drink in days. His voice managed to overpower the alarm for a distance, but there wasn't any sort of response. 'Okay. Alarms don't just happen for no reason. Breathe deep, shake off the bleariness, and focus. Find someone who knows what's going on, or failing that, figure out what's wrong exactly. You don't react to a fire the same way you do a tornado, after all...' Knowing what was going on was the first step in... well, not stepping right into it and landing flat on his face. Twisting his head back and forth to try and judge if he should go forward or backward down this hall- and which way was forward and which backward, for that matter- Jack became aware that the lights on the floor were pulsing in a wave pattern that seemed to go from one side and toward the other.

As good a sign of which way to go as any, since there wasn't a big orange sign with the word 'exit' and an arrow on it around here. As he headed down the passageway, his boots thumped with heavy weight down on the metal plating beneath him. Hold on a second. Boots? He only ever wore sneakers! Glancing down along his figure, he looked to be wearing some sort of full-body jumpsuit of a well-fitted material that felt like some kind of a mix between coarse rubber and stiff plastic. It also looked blue, but everything looked blue at this point. Alright, the militaristic combat-boot footwear he had on was definitely black, he knew that much even being barely able to see it at all in this light.
He briefly took note of an oddly-shaped holster on his left hip that certainly didn't have any sort of firearm in it, unless they started making firearms that were vaguely rectangular and about an inch wide. He intended to investigate further, but his attention was demanded on maintaining his balance a moment later.

The shudder through the floor seemed to intensify, just as he had gotten used to the light rumbling of unsteady footing beneath him. Jack felt a brief sensation of vertigo as his stomach dropped out from under him followed by a hard jolt of impact that rattled every bone in his body. Staggering toward the wall to brace himself, it seemed like whatever was going on had hit a lull or even wrapped up completely. A voice that was just slightly feminine but most certainly robotic echoed around him, "Relocation procedure complete, initiating embedding nodes and reboot protocols." The tone was clipped, quick, and professional. Like a lawyer reading from a script, the little sense of emotion in the tone coming across as insincere.

It was a voice that was so familiar. A voice he had heard a thousand times before. No, more than that! "Isn't that the assitant voice from Starcraft? The adjutant that announces your base alerts and enemy attacks? How-?" Jack's train of thought was forcibly derailed by the sudden 'ding' in his ear, turning on reflex and expecting to see someone hovering over his shoulder. It seems that merely saying the appropriate word had drawn someone's- or something's- attention. "Do you have a query, Pilot 21283?" If it wasn't for the fact it didn't sound like it was coming from inside his head, he would have thought it was some kind of stress-induced hallucination. But it distinctly came from his right side, albeit as if someone was getting uncomfortably close to him. Scratching at his ear, he felt a sliver of metal at the base of it. Some kind of aural implant?

"Do you have a query, Pilot 21283?" The exact same tone, inflection, pronunciation. It was definitively some sort of recorded voice playing back to him. "You're talking to me, right?" Jack spoke in a stage-whisper that wouldn't have carried more than ten feet from him, even as dead-silent as the surroundings were at this point now that the rumbling had drawn to a close and the siren had been switched off.
"Confirmed. Please state your query." "Where the hell am I, and what's going on here?" That seemed like the best place to start... though, perhaps standing around in the middle of a shimmering steel-grey metal hallway in unnerving silence wasn't the best location to have this little discussion. Lacking further direction, he kept walking in the direction the emergency lighting had been indicating prior to the lights coming back on.

"Pilot 21283 is currently aboard the Command Center 1 of an as-of-yet named planet with the designation 'A73-S994-Z5-1' following standard Terran Galactic naming convention of 'area-sector-zone-planet'. The base relocation due to hostile wildlife interference has been completed successfully, and full operational status will be restored in approximately 3.7 hours." As much as his knee-jerk reaction was to laugh and find out which of his friends decided to take their teasing of his fascination with Starcraft to the next level, a certain part of him felt a building excitement. If- and it's a big if, to be sure- that rumbling had been the thrusters that allowed some of the variety of Terran structures to lift off into the sky to reposition and the sudden jolt following had been a landing... didn't it make a kind of sense?

"Uh, adjutant, can you confirm my status? You keep referring to me as a pilot. Am I expected to control spacecraft?" The building excitement of getting to cruise through space in a Wraith or Banshee-class fighter was starting to course through him. Even if he had a feeling that he was in no way qualified to even begin to touch that sort of vehicle. He probably should count himself lucky if he got to zip around in a dropship! "Negative. Confirmation of Pilot 21283 status. Pilot is permitted the use of: Class T280 space construction vehicle. The T-280 SCV pilot is responsible for the following: assembly of new structures, repairing of damaged structures and vehicles, and handling collection and transport of strategic resource materials such as minerals and vespene gas."

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Jack's excitement was only slightly doused by this information. Sure, an SCV was the absolute bottom-level of machinery employed by Terrans as a whole, but he was going to get inside one! And ideally pilot it, but Jack didn't want to put the cart before the horse, and figured he'd need some kind of training to do that. Hopefully there weren't any questions about how he wound up here so suddenly with no idea how to do what was supposedly his job. After all, getting caught wandering the halls in what could only be a military structure sounded pretty terrible, but the Adjutant had some sort of record on him and answered his questions. How bad could it be? "Adjutant, where is everyone?"

"All personnel who managed to board before emergency lift are currently on-station." Well... obviously? He didn't think that an AI could be snarky, but that was about as close to a non-answer as he could get. 'Well, that's not promising, considering it sounds like this place had to relocate in a hurry.' Jack mused to himself, as he reached the end of the hall he had started in. It was a dead end with a serious-looking blast door and seemingly no way to open it. No keypad, no card-swipe, and certainly not anything as straightforward as a handle. "Adjutant, where am I? Why is this door closed?" "Pilot 21283 is currently outside of the station Mess Hall, which doubles as a survival shelter in emergency conditions. Doors will be unsealed when the base reinitialization completes in approximately 3.7 hours."

"So I'm just supposed to sit around for the next nearly four hours and twiddle my thumbs?" Jack demanded an answer with an exasperated expression, throwing his hands in the air for emphasis... unsure if the Adjutant could even see it. He didn't see any cameras in the hall, at least. "Exercise is a permissible activity to pass the time, and sensors indicate Pilot 21283 would fit in his control console more easily if he partook in more of it going forward." Okay, now Jack knew the damn thing was sassing him.

Leaning against the wall- or rather, the 'bulkhead' as the Adjutant corrected him when he used the inaccurate term- Jack was mostly trying to sort out his thoughts on his current situation. The last thing he remembered was that question about his commanding abilities, and that he had been told that he needed to prove it. If that was the case, why was he registered as some simple SCV pilot? Shouldn't he be the base commander, or at the very least a squad commander? An SCV wasn't in charge of anything! Usually they were stuck being the one following orders.

"Adjutant, how much longer?" "Approximately 3.5 hours, roughly 12 minutes since your last inquiry." "Oh shut up." "Affirmative." The brief back and forth at least convinced him that this was actually a real artificial intelligence, not just a voice reading off preprogrammed lines. It talked back enough that it would take a particularly curious programmer to set things up to behave like this otherwise. Maybe it only liked to talk back because he lacked any authority, as far as he knew. So, here he was, presumably on an alien world aboard a station he could list off the health and armor values for by heart, or the time it took to manufacture SCVs, even how much it cost to upgrade all off the top of his head... but that he had a feeling he effectively knew nothing practical about. If SCVs could still be built in 12 seconds, he had a feeling they would already have a small army of the things.

His recollection of the Terran tech tree might come in handy, but that was likely something the Adjutant or some other computer already had on file for anyone who needed it. Do unit counters and cheap strategies he used in the past translate across to this new... reality? Yeah, reality. At least that's what Jack's going to stick to until he's proven wrong, as there's nothing he can do about it if this really is some sort of coma-related fever dream. "Adjutant-" "The timer is now 3.4 hours." The robotic voice interjected preemptively. While the voice remained just as evenly spoken and unchanging in pitch and demeanor, he got the feeling it was getting annoyed with him regardless. "No, I wasn't going to ask that. Is there a way to open communications with the Mess Hall?" "Please state the name of the personnel you wish to contact, and I will endeavor to link communication devices."

Jack ran a hand across the top of his head, running fingers through his messy hair and sucking at his teeth as he tried to consider what to say. Would it be weird if he said that he didn't know anyone on the station? Eh. Just play it out as if he's a new arrival and see how it goes. "I don't know anyone by name, can you connect me to whoever is responsible for new arrivals?" A clearly negative-sounding buzzer-like chime played in his ear, and even after waiting a few seconds, there didn't seem to be any further response. "Okay... let's try something else. Can you connect me to just... anyone?" He didn't particularly care who he wound up talking to, it would beat sitting here in the hallway by himself until the doors opened. "Pilot 21283, you have an incoming communication request from Pilot 21283. Do you accept?" The robotic tone chirped in his ear, and he could swear he felt a malicious smile going along with the clearly mocking compliance to his request. "Very funny." Jack rolled his eyes, "Decline, thank you. Can you connect me to anyone else?"

The same negative-buzzer he was starting to associate with a virtual equivalent to a middle finger repeated in his ear. "Well why not? Is it really so necessary that I know someone by name to start a communication with them?" His complaints were met with silence, followed by a chirping, positive-sounding ding from the holster on his left hip. Oh wow, he had already almost forgotten about that thing. "Due to Pilot 21283's repeated concerns, he has been granted access to a list of personnel. Please use this to contact any base staff at your leisure."

The holster held what he could only see as a PDA mixed with a tablet, a rectangular device about six inches wide and ten inches tall. When he lifted the screen toward his face, he sighed in relief when he realized he could still read the words. He expected it, but with how today had been going, he wouldn't have been surprised if he had to start learning the Terran equivalent of the ABCs all over again. Jack tapped on the flashing icon that looked like an exclamation point with a red '1' next to it, and then the single alert in his inbox. With the title of 'list of on-site personnel', it seemed promising, until he saw that he could read the whole message at a glance. 'Oh no. No, no, no. You're kidding me...' Jack swallowed with visible nervousness, and called out "Adjutant, can you confirm this list of on-site personnel? This isn't some form of hazing for the new guy, right?" He really, really hoped that it was. He'd forgive the AI for being snarky, he'd laugh at his misfortune with the other crewmembers down the line. Anything. Because the list of on-site personnel contained only a single name.

His.

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